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In response to this piece in the New York Times — a particularly fun addition to a growing list of major newspaper pieces by people who don’t read young adult fiction but publicly disparage it anyway.

Dear Mr. Stein,

You’re a humorist, yes? Your books (and possibly this column) are meant to be funny? That’s just ducky: good for you!

I don’t read humour writing, myself. Perhaps funny books are lovely, full of characters so alive you could swear you know them personally, like the works of Meg Rosoff. Maybe they can make the simplest language into a fully breathing description of the glory of the world, like the children’s books of E.B. White. Maybe they take the shattering pain that made Melinda from Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak silence herself and turn it into crooked little smiles, smiles that hide too much. I don’t know because I don’t read anything that’s meant to be “funny.”

I’m sure it’s fine for some. I remember the boys in class who could get a laugh. The one with a line in fart jokes. The one who could burp the whole alphabet. Those kids grow up. They need something to read. Maybe they’ll even learn something from books like yours, who knows? Personally, whenever I see someone reading, say, Pratchett, I judge them instantly. You’d think they could at least get one of those classy leather book covers to hide their shame.

For my part, I’ll read humour books after I’ve finished the 3,000 years of writing that’s entirely serious. After all, books aren’t meant to be fun. They’re improving. That’s why teachers assign them.

Fair warning: reading the whole canon may take me a while. I’m currently stuck in the Greeks, and I’m not sure whether to re-read Antigone or Euclid’s Geometry. They’re both pretty serious, and yet, last time I read them, they both gave me delight. Hmmm. These genre distinctions are tricky. It’s almost as if they weren’t marks of quality at all.

Take John Green, for instance. I admit I skipped ahead of the Greeks a bit and read his book on kids with cancer, The Fault in Our Stars. I was sure it would count as serious — it’s got those breathing characters (only one of them can’t breathe very well). It’s got a Shakespearean riff for a title and a sort of metatextual problem of authorship point on which the plot turns. Plus, you know, it’s kids with cancer. How fun could it be? And yet I laughed so hard reading the egg-the-car scene that my husband made me read it to him, which made me laugh even harder, bittersweet crying real laughter that made snot bubbles come out my nose. But I swear I didn’t mean to read that. We Serious Readers are considering some kind of labelling system, warning against “mixed” books like this. Or possibly a fatwa.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for your piece “Adults should Read Adult Books” and wish you good luck with your future “funny” work.

Yours in all seriousness,

Erin Bow Young Adult Author

Look for more New York Times “balance” pieces, including the one for the series on contemporary theatre (Maxin Kon’s “I’m a movie director and plays are for suckers”) and the one for series on artisan teas (“Grow up and drink coffee”).

Check out this Adam Gopnik piece from the New Yorker on why young people like fantasy novels. For a change, it’s NOT insulting to youth or to fantasy. (Much.)

I’m not sure I agree with everything — though it’s always hard not to agree with Gopnik; he’s such a good writer that he can make anything sound reasonable and insightful, if not revolutionary. But he’s spot on about this: fantasy elevates ordinary and eternal problems of young people (and the rest of us, though Gopnik doesn’t say that) into stories via the language of myth. It turns “No one really knows me” into “I’ve got a secret identity.” It turns “I don’t understand why other people act the way they do” into “I’m trapped in a faerie realm.” It turns “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell” into “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell.”

I once told a class of 12th Graders that Plain Kate was autobiographical. “Not that I’ve ever fallen victim to a witch hunt because I don’t quite fit in,” I ad-libbed, “except that high school is exactly like that.” As one, they locked eyes and some even nodded. It was an electric moment: my hair stood up. All of them looked at me, all of them. Even the cheerleaders.

“Be kind,” says Pliny, “for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

There are certain things in life that are glorious, and they are glorious for everyone. There are more that are hard, and they are hard for everyone. We like to see these things retold, but with dragons.

Me, and just about every other YA author I know, am grumbling about this WSJ article/opinion piece. In the piece, the reviwer today’s “brutal” and “depraved” Young Adult fiction as “book industry’s ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young.” All hope is not lost, though, because “No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives.”

Ummmm. Okay.

Listen, WSJ, I know my book, Plain Kate, isn’t a light read. It takes place in a world where being a bit different can get you run out of town at best, burned as a witch at worst. (You may be familiar with this world: high school students seem to be.) Among other things it is about friendship and its limits, family and its loss, the strength of community versus the horror of the mob. It is a book about grief and courage. Writing it cost me quite a bit of both.

If the internet quotation collections are anything to judge by, if any sentence from Plain Kate will be remembered, it will be this one: “Hope will break the heart better than any sorrow.” Sometimes I think I wrote a whole book just to say that. And whatever else you think of the resulting book, that’s not a coarse theme, and it’s not a miserable one. It’s a dandelion seed, not a bulldozer.

But you have to watch out for dandelions. You flatten a whole genre and lay down a nice sticky layer of disapproval, and the next day the unruly little flowers are cracking on through.